Portrayal

A central proposition in Robert Stake's “The Countenance of Educational Evaluation” was the reporting of program transactions as full descriptions. Later, he provided a different perspective on this idea in a three-page paper presented at the 1972 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, “An Approach to the Evaluation of Instructional Programs: Program Portrayal vs. Analysis.” On that occasion, then, he emphasized portrayal at the expense of focus: “what the evaluator has to say cannot be both a sharp analysis of high-priority achievement and a broad and accurate reflection of the program's complex transactions.” An abridged version appears in Beyond the Numbers Game (Hamilton, MacDonald, King, Jenkins, & Parlett, 1977, pp. 161–162).